GoKawiilChina's National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen announced the Lingshen supercomputer project at a conference on April 24, targeting sustained performance above 2 ExaFLOPS using only CPUs and no foreign-made components.
The system would pack 47,000 processors into 92 compute cabinets, making it the first exascale machine designed to reach that performance tier without GPU accelerators. Lu Yutong, director of the Shenzhen supercomputing center and the system's chief designer, presented the technical details at the event.
Every other exascale system in operation relies heavily on GPUs or accelerator hardware. The U.S. Department of Energy's El Capitan, currently the world's fastest supercomputer, runs on 44,544 AMD MI300A APUs that tightly couple CPU and GPU silicon on a single package. Lingsheng’s CPU-only architecture would represent a fundamentally different approach to reaching exascale throughput.
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The project is split into a pilot verification phase and a full production system, with the pilot using 100 Huawei Kunpeng servers built on Arm-based Taishan cores, totaling 12,800 cores. The production system scales to 1,580 blade servers using x86 CPUs with 101,120 cores and a theoretical peak above 10 petaflops. 16 four-way servers could add another 2,048 cores, and four eight-way servers could contribute a further 1,280, based on a machine translation of Chinese-language press materials.
The full system would include 36 network cabinets supporting a million-port interconnect, 650PB of planned storage across 428 nodes, and 67 liquid-cooled storage cabinets with 10 TB/s of bandwidth.
Lingsheng's claimed sustained performance of 2+ ExaFLOPS would, if achieved, exceed El Capitan's measured Linpack score of 1.809 ExaFLOPS. While El Capitan's theoretical peak is 2.79 ExaFLOPS, real-world Linpack results are always lower. Obviously, no Linpack or equivalent benchmark data exists for Lingsheng because the system hasn’t been built yet.
China’s claims are at best dubious. On a literal reading of the announcement, China says it might be able to achieve 2+ ExaFLOPS at some point in the future. But El Capitan is already theoretically capable of 2.79 ExaFLOPS, so it’s difficult to see how China’s project is ever going to "cast a new benchmark for global supercomputing," when it’s unlikely to be running even five years from now.
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Then China says there’ll be no reliance on outside vendors for Lingsheng while also claiming that the production system will use x86 CPUs. China’s domestic x86 options are limited to Zhaoxin, a joint venture between VIA Technologies and the Shanghai municipal government, and Hygon, which originally licensed AMD's Zen architecture but lost access to updated designs following U.S. export restrictions.
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